Welcome back to students of the Microbe. This semester, The Pundit is going to concentrate on Microbial Biotechnology.

He's especially emphasising technological innovation. It's this innovation that has delivered most economic growth this last century, and that's what solves problems in this world - prosperity and resources that better management other problems in societies feasible.

To start the innovation ball rolling, The Pundit is posting some examples of how innovation over time allows biotechnology products to be made more cheaply and efficiently.

This is the slow burn of incremental improvement year after year, only a few percent per year, but eliminating much poverty over decades.

A super example is ethanol fermentation used in Brazil to make liquid fuels. That is, sugar cane based biofuel.

This started out being relatively energy, land, and cost inefficient in the early 1980s, and bioethanol fuel nearly collapsed as an industry in Brazil when oil prices fell because it was very costly. It dragged subsidies from other areas of agriculture where investment was sorely needed. Not so today.

In this case many technological innovations have allowed ethanol from sugar cane to become energy efficient (with fuel energy output being 3-4 times the fuel energy input EOIR) .

Brazilian ethanol is now cost competitive with petroleum liquid fuels without any subsidy. These innovations, including biotechnology-based method changes in fermentation and strain improvement, are ongoing, and there is ample room for further efficiency improvement and more innovation.

A detailed economic documentation of this case is given by Goldemberg et al 2004.

Economic competitiveness is a very frequent argument against renewable energy (RE). This paper demonstrates, through the Brazilian experience with ethanol, that economies of scale and technological advances lead to increased competitiveness of this renewable alternative, reducing the gap with conventional fossil fuels.

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About Me

Interested in correcting misuse of biology, helping people benefit from innovation.I teach courses in food science, food safety, biotechnology and microbiology at the University of Melbourne. My Bachelor Degree is in biochemistry and my Ph.D. applied molecular genetics. Thesis topic -- production of an animal feed supplement using genetically manipulated bacteria.---My recent publications have been on epidemics caused by bacterial pathogens, published in high-ranking journals. My current area of research is food risk analysis and management. The most important of these risks are microbes in food and microbial products that are toxic.